Quote:
Originally Posted by master3004
What makes paladin the best class?
I'm still learning and only averaging about 4 wins an arena. Priest seems to be my strongest class so far. Haven't really experimented with paladin, but I am pretty poor with him him basic. I've always heard mage is the end all be all in arena, but I'm awful with her.
Hopefully this makes sense, I'm definitely not the best HS player out there.
Essentially, right now Arena is about tempo, which is to say that the best decks are generally very very good at playing cards that help you gain board initiative (such as creatures that can kill an opponent's creature and still be a threat on the board). Often the key to this is being able to play your full mana's worth of cards every turn while forcing your opponent to 'skip' their turn by doing something inefficient early on which will slow them down.
An example of this might be you playing against a Mage, where they play first. On turn one you both pass. On turn two they play a 2/2 (frostwolf grunt, or pint-sized summoner or something), you respond by playing a 2/3 (mechwarper, river crocolisk, etc). The mage then decides the best way to respond is to run the 2/2 into the 2/3 and then kill it with the hero power, and then ending their turn. Essentially you've gained a sizeable edge in tempo here, as you are now the person acting 'first' on the board. Similar edges in tempo can be gained by using things like divine shields, or cards that grant buffs like shattered sun cleric or dark iron dwarf. Ideally you gain enough of a tempo edge that your opponent is constantly forced to have an answer to each new threat you play every turn, without having a chance to develop their own threats.
Anyway, Paladin has a ton of cards that are really great at doing this. Shielded Minibot (2/2 divine shield) is capable of killing two 3/2s (or you could use something like blessing of kings to have a 6/6 with divine shield). Truesilver Champion generally allows you to remove two of your opponent's threats at the cost of only one card. Argent protector often lets you kill an opponent's creature for free. Similarly, the hero power works very well in a tempo sense. Those 1/1s may not look like much, but if you can combine them with an abusive sergeant or dark iron dwarf, suddenly they're like a 3 damage removal if your opponent doesn't deal with them, or add a stormwind champion into the mix and now you have an army of 2/2s.
And you can see that the decklist Bobbo posted is full of really great tempo cards. Muster for Battle (equip a 1/4 weapon that can do cleanup duty on creatures [eg. suddenly your weapon and an ogre brute can kill a chillwind yeti]), Stampeding Kodo (kill a 2 attack creature for free + put a 3/5 creature of your own on the board), Dark Iron Dwarf (allows one of your small creatures to kill a bigger one), etc.
Mage is also a really strong class, and you *can* play a very strong tempo game with it, but it's usually slightly more difficult to draft in that direction, and its value generally lies more in being able to efficiently remove the other person's threats (polymorph, flamestrike, fireball, frostbolt, etc.). I think Mage and Paladin are probably super close in terms of which is better in arena for most players; but it's all very player dependent.